


And So I Long For Snow

by katonahottinroof



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen, M/M, Mythology References, Post-The Hanging Tree, Pre-Slash, Spoilers for The Hanging Tree
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 07:47:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13049670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katonahottinroof/pseuds/katonahottinroof
Summary: It's December in London and the temperature's dropping a lot quicker than anyone would like, especially the Commissioner. Is it just regular global warming up to its wacky old tricks, or is something more sinister - and magical - responsible?





	And So I Long For Snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tantamoqwrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tantamoqwrites/gifts).



> For Tantamoqwrites, who wanted English magical folklore, canon-compliant Peter/Nightingale, slow burn and cups of tea... I hope I managed to deliver.
> 
> Dear Tantamoqwrites - happy Yuletide 2017! I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thank you for your wonderful prompts and ideas - I can only hope I've managed to write something that will tick a couple of your likes at least. Your other fandoms sound gloriously interesting, although not ones I've heard of before, and I might have to give them a try at some point!
> 
> Wishing you all the best, my darling recipient, over the Yuletide period and throughout 2018.

It was cold when I woke up. Colder than usual, even taking into account that it was nearly Christmas and London had been struggling with a cold snap since early December. I don’t know what kind of magic Molly usually uses to keep the upper floors of the Folly toasty-warm (I’ve seen the boiler in the basement, and that thing should have been retired about the time Queen Victoria bid adieu to this sweet world – or at least the parts of it that England had colonised, planted flags on and run roughshod over for centuries) but it had been failing her, and therefore us, recently.

There was a rag-rug covering the ancient wooden floor next to my bed – not much, but enough to keep the chill off until I’d stuffed my feet into a pair of battered tartan house slippers that Molly had dug up from somewhere. Not fashionable, and certainly second-hand at least, but I’ll willingly sacrifice fashion for keeping my toes non-frostbitten and still attached in all their wiggly this-little-piggy-went-to-market glory.

I shivered into my dressing gown – not quite as Edwardian as Nightingale’s, and probably a bit more threadbare than he’d like – and hissed out a breath that turned to fog in front of me as I opened the bedroom door. It was even colder in the hallway than my bedroom, and there was an unearthly hush over the halls of the Folly – more unearthly than usual, given that it was the Folly, and chock-full of the _vestigia_ from generations of what Nightingale calls his predecessors.

I jumped a little when I saw Molly standing at the other end of the corridor, just at the top of the stairs. Only a little – I’m getting used to her sudden and silent appearances, and in no way did I squeak. And, if I had, it would have been a manly murmur of surprise, and no reason for Molly’s mouth to quirk up at the corners even as she lifted a hand to cover what I’m sure wasn’t a laugh at my expense.

I frowned. “Yeah, ha ha,” I sniffed pointedly, and ignored what I swear was a snicker, “Nightingale up yet?”

At this, Molly frowned, losing all pretence of humour at my expense, and shook her head.

I glanced at my wrist, noting the time on the heavy, old-fashioned watch that Nightingale had given me for Christmas a couple of years before. It was a gorgeous thing, I supposed, although I’d be the first to admit that I don’t know the thing about watches. It looked old, but well-cared for. More to the point, it was later than we usually woke up – Nightingale was a stickler for routine, and Molly always had breakfast on the table in the dining room promptly at seven-thirty on weekdays, eight-thirty on weekends unless we were sunk in the depths of a case.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” I asked, and Molly did something that (had she not had a lot more dignity than me) I totally would have called an eyeroll. “Well, I didn’t hear you knock.”

Molly turned, with one last ‘cower, brief mortal’ look at me, and glided off up the stairs to the next level and Nightingale’s room.

“Oh, wait, hang on,” I tried to balk, but Molly wrapped her long (and cold, Jesus, like little rods of ice) fingers around my wrist and tugged me along in her wake like I weighed no more than Toby. “His bedroom? Really?” I muttered and definitely not with a whining note to my voice.

If an Englishman’s home is his castle, yadda yadda, then Nightingale’s bedroom was his Tower of London, Fort Knox and Gringotts all rolled up into one – unless he was shot, you DID NOT ENTER, unless your name was Molly or Dr Walid, who tended to bull-headedly ignore whatever Nightingale said in favour of what was actually best for Nightingale, an effort that I applauded because _someone_ had to make sure my guv obeyed orders.

When we actually got to Nightingale’s door, however, I could see why Molly would have had trouble waking him for breakfast if his alarm clock had failed. The solid oak door was completely covered in a five-inch thick layer of ice.

We stopped, staring at it.

“Well... that’s new,” I said inanely, for want of anything better, and Molly hissed out a breath between her teeth. “Right, yeah... um, don’t suppose you have an axe or anything?” I asked – okay, a little facetiously, because I wasn’t really expecting a response.

To my surprise, except not really because _Molly_ she stepped away to the side and picked up a wickedly-sharp ice pick that had been leaning against one of the ancient leather chairs that dotted the Folly like so many houseplants. This she handed to me with absolutely no ceremony whatsoever, and waved a hand at the iced-over door, all be my guest.

“Yay,” I muttered, gripped the ice-pick in both hands, and swung at the ice. I felt absolutely ridiculous – still in my pyjamas, topped off with battered slippers and equally well-worn dressing gown. Aragorn did not march on Mordor dressed in his jammies and slippers, I can tell you that much. I felt even more ridiculous when the ice-pick did absolutely nothing, just glanced right off and I had to pivot slightly to accommodate the rebound.

Molly looked at me like you might at a particularly dim child.

“You already tried that, didn’t you?” I asked, but she just blinked at me. “Right. Um, you might want to stand back,” I said, and Molly took two large and very obvious steps back, her long skirts rustling quietly around her feet. I sized up the door, took a step back myself, and let loose with an _impello_.

The door shuddered quietly, the ice shards knocked loose tinkled to the floor, but there wasn’t a noticeable difference.

My eyes narrowed. Behind could lie anything (although at this point I was placing my bets on Narnia) and while Nightingale wasn’t exactly defenceless (see: Tiger Tanks, Varvara and that barn out in Essex, and that one time I’d taken the last of Molly’s scones at tea and Nightingale had shot me a very dark look indeed), we weren’t about to let sleeping Nightingales lie.

“ _Impello_ ,” I barked firmly, the forma running through my mind just as Nightingale had taught me. “ _Impello_!”

The door shuddered again, the force of my blows increasing. Next to me, Molly shifted, and I could see her fingers flexing out of the corner of my eye. The ice held firm, though, and I stopped after the tenth try because clearly this wasn’t working or doing anything other than frustrating me. I glanced helplessly at Molly.

***

But maybe, as the saying goes, I’m getting too far ahead of myself, even if Nightingale would get that disapproving little twist to the corner of his mouth if he caught me starting a sentence with ‘but’.

Winding back a couple of months, and the Faceless Man was a little less faceless – not in a creepy, ultra-horror, face falling off kind of way, but more in that we had a name and once the mighty force of the Metropolitan Police have your name, you’re nicked, my son.

Or, at least, that’s what we’d mostly like you to think and sometimes it’s even true.

Lesley had disappeared again, Varvara was in the wind, and Lady Caroline was making me antsy – sort of how I imagined a big sister would make you antsy when they were the straight-A student and I’d once managed to get distracted on New Years in Trafalgar Square reading the inscription on a statue’s bum. Between Caroline, my mum and Molly (not to mention Stephanopoulos, our dear self-styled Muslim ninja DC Guleed, Mama Thames and every single one of her absolutely terrifying daughters), my life was decidedly crowded with powerful women – a fact that gave me the heebie-jeebies to no end but was also comforting, in a way that I was probably going to be extremely thankful for in the future.

A not-so-chilly November, then. At least, season-appropriate levels of chilliness and no more than that.

Nightingale and I were running ourselves nearly ragged searching for Chorley and Lesley, to varying degrees of success and frustration (not a lot, and far too much respectively). Caroline joined us, occasionally, and Nightingale had turned one of the old long wooden tables in the main library into a table of war, the solid furniture covered in reams of paper and stacks of books, ancient blueprints piled with Victorian treatises on fae politics and modern geography textbooks that wouldn’t have looked that out of place in a modern comprehensive (and so were all about twenty years out of date).

Molly had taken to stalking the halls of the Folly at night – I still had no idea where or even if she slept – with Toby dogging (hah!) her heels as she glided silently across the carpet and parquet flooring. Nightingale looked about as calm as ever, most of the time, except for the time we’d barely managed to stop one of Chorley’s Devil’s traps from going off at a primary school just around the corner from the Folly. We had no proof for it, but I couldn’t help but hope that Lesley was breaking from Chorley, or at least mildly disturbed by Chorley’s worsening choice of targets. Surely Lesley wouldn’t go after kids, right? But then, I’d clearly never known Lesley as well as I thought I’d once had done.

The Folly took on an air that it probably hadn’t had in years. Nightingale had essentially declared full-out war and people, most of whom I’d never met before, were frequently arriving to be briefed or debriefed, to drop off packages of ancient books or to pore over the table in the library-cum-war room with Nightingale and I. Frank Caffrey had stationed a rotating guard on the front entrance – a constantly changing parade of men who were all tall, muscular and of a certain age and grimness. Molly (when not patrolling the corridors like a wraith or serving up increasingly stodgy public school food – she was returning to the comforting decades-long habits due to the stress, apparently) was taking great delight in both serving the men up endless rounds of builder-strength tea and seeing how often she could make each of Caffrey’s men jump. I suspected that she was keeping a chart somewhere on her progress.

The one upside to all of this madness that had been inflicted on the Folly and our daily lives was that Nightingale had become remarkably more open and expressive (at least, for someone who had been born in 1900) although this came with a worrying uptick in monitoring my comings and goings as if he thought I’d scamper off to either explode another innocent calculator or get myself captured and vivisected given half the chance.

(Caroline, when I mentioned this, stared at me and shook her head.

“What?” I’d asked, and she’d muttered something that sounded distinctly uncomplimentary under her breath before stalking off in terrifyingly high heels.)

Beverley and I... Well, we’d made it through the ends of autumn, but I woke up one morning to realise that not only hadn’t I seen her for three weeks, but that I hadn’t spoken to her in two. She and I had drifted apart like the gentle currents of a babbling brook, or so went the analogy she gave me when we finally sat down in a branch of Costa near Russell Square and thrashed it out. We’d decided that, even if we hadn’t been friends to start with, we would have stayed so even after that cup of coffee if only to piss off Lady Ty. Bev had walked me back to the Folly from the cosy little corner of the coffee shop that we’d tucked ourselves in to have our little chat, and she’d pulled me into a fiercely tight hug on the doorstep of the coach-house.

“Stay well, Peter,” she’d told me, looking a little wistful (or maybe that was my own wishful imagination), and I sniffled a little, hugging her back just as tightly. I’d had dreams (beyond _those_ types of dreams) about Bev and I – that we were for keeps, for always, and boy was my mum going to be pissed at the diminishing chances of any grandchildren in the near or distant future.

It didn’t stop Bev from coming around, though – I’d once walked in on her in the coach-house curled up with Molly on the sofa and watching re-runs of Great British Bake Off while Beverley, no joke, was painting Molly’s toenails. Backing out of the room slowly had been my only option at that point and I’d wandered off to sulk around the main library while Nightingale was trying to work until he’d threatened me with extra Ancient Greek lessons (I was getting on rather well in Latin by this point, but Nightingale’s always been of the opinion that there’s no point in resting on your laurels when there’s yet another exceedingly complicated language – preferably form the ancient world, and one preferably with a completely different alphabet – to learn).

Nightingale had also sat me down and given me a surprisingly heartfelt (but no less horrifying for all its good intentions) talk post-Bev, full of well-worn maxims about how it was better to have loved and lost, and how it was important to treasure the memories of the good times with the other person. How it was important to remember that Beverley would still be around, in one way or another. I got the sneaking feeling (call it my wizardly intuition) that he was only refraining from mentioning a certain wizard of his circa-World War II acquaintance by the skin of his teeth, and he’d got a little quiet at one point before hauling himself to his feet and clapping one hand to my shoulder before wandering off ‘to make sure Molly wasn’t scaring the men downstairs to their deaths’.

Aside from terrifying hardened ex-paras, Molly was spring-cleaning. In November.

“She does this,” Nightingale told me with a sigh during one Ancient Greek lesson as we listened to heavy furniture being moved two storeys above our heads, the kind of furniture that would normally take three grown men to move and one old gaffer with a flat cap to supervise them doing it. Molly didn’t seem to be having any trouble. “The Masters used to complain about the staff reorganising the chairs in the libraries during the War, and the staff blamed the visiting students and their pranks. Of course, it was only Molly.” He paused, his mouth a twist of thoughtfulness. “She doesn’t like change.”

“Who does?” I asked, and distracted him by stringing together a truly awful sentence in Ancient Greek that, had it been translated into modern English, would have ended up along the lines of ‘the cat in the dwelling of the river next to enters mournfully’. Not my best work, but Nightingale gave that particular little sigh he reserved for those special moments when I managed to drive him right up the wall.

God, but I’m good.

***

Ah, hubris. The bane of my existence.

Molly, being Molly, wasn’t content with shifting a few bookcases and four-poster beds. I ran into her on the back stairs one day, late to meet Nightingale downstairs on the range to practise a particularly nasty tactical fourth-order forma (they make things go boom, which I can already do, but in a much more... explode-y sort of way, and Nightingale had ramped up my offensive training). Molly was hefting a large bucket and a mop, and had those weird outer sleeve things on like you see in Downton Abbey when the below-stairs lot are polishing the silver or his Lordship’s medals or something.

I found out later that she’d been into the attic of the Folly, a place no sane person dare tread, or at least not without a hefty torch and nightstick, Nightingale as back-up for preference. It was huge, spanning the entire space of the floor below, with a high ceiling that only started to slope down as you got close to the walls. I imagine, in the Folly’s heyday, it would have seen a lot of use – probably still for storage, but with people going up and down a little more regularly than once a decade.

I’d been up there once, with Toby. There were spiders the size of tea plates, I swear, and I’d felt the heavy _vestigia_ of centuries past.

It had given me the creeps and at the time I’d happily retreated back down to a nice warm cup of tea.

Molly, however, had no guilt over dragging me up to help her move stuff around once the worst of the dirt was cleaned off. Not that she needs help with the heavy-lifting – I reckon she just likes to remind me who’s boss, although trust me, I don’t need the reminder. It’s always going to be the person in charge of feeding you, because you seriously don’t want to piss off someone with the power over what goes into your food. And even if you forget _that_ , there’s always those long, sharp teeth to remind you.

There was junk there from God only knows when. Stacks of it – boxes labelled in varying hands on paper tags that had been pasted on the sides or lids and was now cracking and crumbling under the weight of years past, so Molly was having me re-box certain things. Boxes of clothes and shoes that went out of fashion in the late eighteen hundreds, by the looks of them, stacks of musty linen and a truly insane amount of candelabras – no books though. I reckoned those were all down in the libraries.

“Did they never throw anything away?” I asked. My mum would probably approve.

There was a huge and ancient rocking horse off to one side. I have no idea why and I definitely do not want to know – it’s not like there had ever been kids running around the Folly – and it had a slightly too-accurate face, but it’s probably just my imagination that the eyes followed me about the room, right? It’s not like we had a haunted rocking horse stashed up in the attic, because I think I’ve seen that horror movie and it does not end well for any of the plucky adventuring types involved (namely yours truly).

The _vestigia_ was stronger in one corner of the attic, pretty much than the rest of the place put together. Molly had swatted at me when I moved in for a more thorough examination, and I noticed how she skirted the edge of that space like there was an invisible line drawn on the floor.

So, of course, when Molly went down for more boxes, I took a closer look. In the name of science.

The _vestigia_ was definitely stronger – the sharpness of a bitter winter wind, the smell of fresh snow and pine trees, and a feeling of silence so intense that I thought I’d temporarily gone deaf. There was an ornate wooden chest tucked away, bound with brass fixings and carved with what looked like they could possibly be an artist’s rendition of snowflakes... if the artist in question had never seen snowflakes before and had peculiar ideas of how wooden carvings should act.

I blinked. It was like the carvings were bending through space while at the same time maintaining their flat appearance.

The wood was cold to the touch when I rested my hand against it. Not just cool, the ways objects get when they’re in a cold place, but cold like I’d pressed my hand to a pane of glass when the temperature outside was below freezing. I hissed and drew my hand back. I’d left a mark – the heat of my hand had seemingly melted the thin layer of frost that I hadn’t noticed covered the box, and the frost was rapidly creeping back to reclaim its space.

There was no key in the lock, but I tried to lift the lid anyway, and was disappointed when I saw that it was completely empty. I shut it, staring at the chest, before the sound of the attic door creaking open caught my attention, and I hurriedly stepped away before Molly could catch me slacking and promptly forgot all about the chest.

***

Have you heard of Pandora and her box? Rule one – don’t open boxes of mysterious origin.

A shame I hadn’t learnt to leave things well enough alone when clearly out of my depth.

***

The temperature began dropping rapidly that night. London’s never exactly been the tropics – except for those one or two days every summer where it feels like the streets are hot enough to fry eggs and everyone starts complaining when the mercury rises above twenty-six degrees – but it had been about twelve degrees in mid-November, and was barely making it above zero by the start of December. Not exactly a Canadian winter, but much colder than I was used to.

Molly had broken out the industrial-sized supply of hot water bottles because there seemed to be issues with the furnace that fed the ancient boiler in the basement. I got by with wearing a hoodie over my jumper, and two pairs of socks with my slippers while in the Folly, and Nightingale had taken to wearing scarves wrapped around his neck in what I thought was referred to as an ascot. It was permanently cold, and we’d stopped using the lab with its stone floor and high ceilings as much as possible.

Outside, Londoners dealt with it the way they tended to deal with a lot of things inconveniencing them – with a great deal of complaining, dire proclamations in the newspapers, and ‘oh, isn’t it cold?’s being exchanged between commuters.

Then the snow started.

Now, don’t get me wrong – snow’s pretty, it’s fun for kids and adults alike, and we don’t get a lot of it in England, or at least not in the south-east. And I can’t deny that seeing London covered in a fluffy white blanket of the stuff nudged some part of my inner-child which reacted predictably with delight and a wish to go out and play and make a snow-angel... although I’d never made a snow angel before in my life, and the adult part of me cringed at the idea of running around in cold, wet socks.

Nightingale looked mildly perturbed at breakfast, a crease in his forehead between his eyebrows.

“I don’t remember it ever coming down this early before,” he said, paying less attention to his copy of the Times and his breakfast than the window through which we could still see the snow coming down in gentle flurries.

“’Tis the season,” I grinned around a mouthful of toast, and Nightingale sighed.

“Quite. Oh, Peter, honestly!” 

It was when the Jag wouldn’t start (and neither would my shiny new toy, appropriated by Nightingale) that I began to actually worry.

And the snow kept falling.

***

I’d noticed, in that first week of December, that Nightingale looked increasingly worried, chewing at his bottom lip the way he did when he was too concerned or preoccupied to remember the manners that were instilled into him as a kid. I don’t think that this was Chorley-related worry either, or not only Chorley-related.

By the 6th December, London had been covered in snow, and it showed no signs of disappearing any time soon, either. The temperature hadn’t climbed above freezing in three days, and while the actual snowfalls were slowing, the dropping temperatures meant that the bottom layers on the pavements, hard-packed as they were from the countless pairs of feet that trod them every day, were freezing into thick, slippery layers of ice.

It all still seemed mundane, though, if unusual, but the clue hammer really dropped when we realised that the rest of the UK – especially the bits you would normally expect this nonsense from, i.e. the Hebrides, the Brecon Beacons – were, while not completely unaffected, nowhere near as bad as London and the surrounding area.

The borough councils were sending out the gritters every morning, but slowly the supplies were beginning to run out and it’s difficult to beg, borrow or steal in a government-sanctioned way when the rest of the UK was feeling like they were going to be next.

This definitely hit the weird-o-meter, and Nightingale had been holding conference calls with the Commissioner most days, because not even the Commissioner was enough of a stickler that he’d insist on status reports in person when the Met had issued an official warning for everyone to stay inside unless necessary.

I entered the living room – I’ve heard Nightingale refer to it as the Drawing Room, but for all the time we’ve spent together over the last couple of years, I’m still not one hundred percent on when he’s joking to mess with me (and the stories coming out every so often like glimpses into his past are only serving to back that up. Nightingale was a menace, by all accounts, when he was younger – more so at Casterbrook, admittedly, but still.)

Nightingale was tucked in one of the armchairs by a roaring fire that served to heat a radius of about ten feet out from it. I joined him and sat down opposite, my attention mostly on the leaping flames as my feet felt like blocks of ice.

“It’s getting colder,” he said, and I looked up to see him staring morosely into the flames. “Minus ten, today.” He was leaning back in his chair, and his hair had come loose from whatever lacquer the man had been slicking it back with since before I was born. A loose hank of it had fallen forward over his forehead and the generously light from the fire added to the effect to make him look younger – softer in a way.

Nightingale had removed his tie and undone the top button of his shirt, and a lot of things were beginning to click into place. Caroline’s disbelief, Bev’s sad humour... even Lady Ty had given us the side-eye the last time we’d dragged ourselves out to meet, Ty not willing to sacrifice her power – even temporarily – by setting foot in the Folly. I blinked back a memory of that first time I’d seen him in Covent Garden, and I’d thought him handsome then. I considered myself more equal opportunity than not – David back in sixth form had confirmed that for me, and mutual fumbling with someone in the dark at a school disco works out more or less the same in the end.

But aside from an expectant leap in my stomach region back then, the fleeting idea that he’d been looking for that slightly ethnic and younger man of his immediate needs, Nightingale had never said a single word to me about his preference either for or against his own team. He had in fact been strictly professional after that first moment when I’d clearly lost control of my higher-brain function in front of an attractive person and admitted that I was hunting for a ghost. I’d probably just been imagining the way his gaze had swept down the length of my body, right?

I had never seen him looking so undone – that was the point. I felt like they must have done in Victorian times, when the sight of a well-turned ankle or whatever used to drive the boys mad.

Well, I can’t speak for Nightingale’s ankles, but I had a sudden desperate need to press my mouth to the hollow at the base of his throat and lick.

I swallowed, my throat tight.

“Definitely magical, then?” I asked, although we’d been pretty certain for a while. There was just something about the flurries of snow that seemed off, even before the unseasonal blizzards.

“The commissioner seems pretty sure,” he let his head fall back to rest against the back of the chair which coincidentally showed off the line of his neck, and I manfully suppressed a whimper. Bev and Caroline were never going to let me live this down. “He asked what we were doing to stop it.”

Ah. ‘Asked’, meaning ‘demanded’. As in, requesting a detailed analysis of the situation, broken down into who (or whom), exactly, was responsible for this mess and why wasn’t it fixed yet? With subsections for which poor bastard was going to be at the bottom of the pile when shit, eventually, rolled downhill.

“Bev called me this morning,” I said. Nightingale lifted his gaze from the fire to me, one eyebrow arched in query. “Said Mama Thames’s looking for someone to sort this out – that the edges of the river are starting to freeze over.”

“That hasn’t happened since the mid-sixties,” he told me, frowning. I opened my mouth to say something, but stopped – Nightingale had the look of a man on the cusp of a realisation. “Oh...”

“Oh?” I repeated, and Nightingale hauled himself to his feet, reaching out to offer me a hand up as well. I took it; his fingers were warm from the fire against mine and I shivered a little, only mostly from the cold. He paused, looking me over, and then snagged a neatly folded blanked from a nearby table, no doubt placed there by Molly, and offered it.

“To the library,” Nightingale said with a flash of a mischievous grin that would surprise most people. Not me – I’d seen him trying to suppress a grin as a miniature raincloud followed me about the Folly’s foyer.

“Wait, this morning we knew nothing. Not even if it was Falcon-related. Now you’re all...” I indicated him as best I could as I wrapped the blanket around me and followed him out into the decidedly colder hall.

“The Thames, Peter, does not freeze over. At least, it doesn’t anymore. It used to, you know – they held fairs on it in winter around the 1600s and onwards.”

“On the river?” I asked, “or on the banks alongside it?”

“Actually on the river – they even managed to get an elephant to cross the ice. Down by Blackfriars, I think. Can you imagine, Peter? Whole roast oxen on roaring fires – on the ice!”

Gone was the morose man I’d walked in on ten minutes before. This Nightingale was practically bouncing.

“Sir, are you saying you know what’s going on?”

“Maybe,” Nightingale admitted, “or, at least, a better grasp of an idea than we’d had this morning.”

We entered the main library, bypassed the war table, and Nightingale began scanning the shelves. He emerged with a slim leather-bound volume, the title and author all but erased with time and what I guessed were hundreds of people handling it. The cover was familiar, though, in the way half-remembered details from dreams are – what looked like an artist’s rendition of some truly bizarre snowflakes was embossed into the leather.

“What,” Nightingale said, “do you know about Old Man Winter?”

***

Old Man Winter. Originally from Norse and possibly Anglo-Saxon winter fireside stories, he’s supposed to be the personification of all things cold and wintery – notably snow, ice, freezing cold weather patterns, the whole kit and caboodle. Sometimes called Grandfather Frost in Russia, Mother Hulda in Germany and various other names the world over.

Most notably, in Britain, called Jack Frost.

He hadn’t been seen since 1963, Nightingale told me as I flicked through the thin book, the last time London had found itself literally snowed under like this.

“So, what are we looking at?” I asked. “A _genius loci_?”

“Think more along the lines of Old God,” Nightingale said, and I just knew by the way I could practically hear those capital letters that this was not going to be something I was going to enjoy. “He’s been around since... oh, maybe even before the Old Man waded into the Thames. Flighty, capricious at best – he’s a complete menace when he wants to be,” but there was something, some twitch at the corner of his mouth that had me suspicious. Look, I’m a member of the Met, I’m supposed to be a suspicious bastard. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the look Nightingale had on his face reminded me of when Darren had been talking about Tanya back when we were in year thirteen. Really.

“And this,” I asked, waving a hand to indicate general outside-ness, “is him?”

Nightingale hummed. “Possibly. Maybe.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Well, he is able to be reasoned with. It could be a lot worse.”

I watched in amazement as he reached up to straighten his collar, seemingly without realising it. This was a Nightingale I’d never seen before, a Nightingale possibly with a crush. I swallowed, and put aside the feeling of what might have been uncertainty, but was definitely not, no way, jealousy, to be packed up in a tight little box at the back of my mind and then never looked at again. I’m British, we repress things.

***

Finding Jack Frost so that we could workshop the current situation and find an alternate solution other than dropping the south-east into a new Ice Age was somewhat more involved than picking up a phone. I was shocked, I tell you. I told Nightingale as well.

(“I thought all good little _genius loci_ and Old Gods had mobiles now, sir?”

“ _Genii loci_ , in the plural, Peter, and don’t be ridiculous,” but he was half-smiling as he said it, so I wasn’t too worried.)

There was no ritual, no spell Nightingale could cast to force him to reveal himself. Jack Frost, as it turned out, was a law unto himself.

“That’s what makes it so difficult to deal with,” Nightingale sighed when another couple of days had gone by with nothing to show for it but the mercury dropping another couple of degrees and the wind picking up. It was now officially freeze-your-bollocks off cold, or whichever bits you might have and might not want to lose. “He used to like the Frost Fairs, you see – the music and dancing, the revelry; it was all a bit like tribute to him.”

And then the Industrial Revolution, the slow creep upwards of the global temperature, and Jack Frost had been losing power anyway as more people turned away from the older superstitions and towards science. A lack of belief, a decrease in opportunity as winters grew warmer, and Jack Frost had faded out from human memory, except in old poems and nursery tales.

“So how, or why, did he manage to come back in the sixties?”

“You know, I really have no idea,” Nightingale mused. “At the time, it just seemed like one of those things, one last burst of magic before the final fade.”

But of course magic hadn’t faded. Magic had been coming back, as the Rivers and Varvara and countless others had mentioned in the past.

“And you haven’t seen him since?”

Nightingale shrugged. “No, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t around, of course.”

***

Which brings us back to where we started. Me, Molly, iced-over solid oak door, and Nightingale languishing somewhere behind it. Not that I was panicking, of course – stalwart members of the Metropolitan Police do not panic.

I was just debating going down to liberate some of the more tame explosives from the armoury, when there was a sound like glaciers shifting, and a huge fault line appeared in the ice before the whole of it – ice, door – was sucked back into the room beyond. Molly and I exchanged a glance and she gently relieved me of an ice pick that I still had no idea that I was holding as I readied the _forma_ for a version of _scindere_.

Nightingale was standing in the middle of his bedroom when we crept in, his pyjama shirt hanging open and revealing a trim figure that I had a little difficulty in tearing my eyes away from. He held his staff in one hand, his other outstretched, and the oak door lay in pieces, none bigger than a large splinter, covering the wooden floor. The ice had split into mini-floes, dotted around with the splinters. I blinked, trying to take in the idea that my governor had just exploded a three-inch thick, old English oak door that had been gracing the Folly since it had been the Folly, and maybe even before. By my side, Molly hissed in a breath, her attention caught by what was on the bed.

Or, rather, who – a young man, about my age, lounging back against the pillows and, yes, half-naked because of course this was just what was needed to round off what was already becoming a very strange morning. I registered that he was irritatingly gorgeous, in the way your radar pings someone walking past you in the street. I was just beginning to think that maybe we’d got the wrong end of the stick, except for two things – one, Nightingale would never bring someone past the wards without making sure Molly and I knew about them, and two, that stupidly thick and weirdly resistant layer of ice over the door-that-was.

“Ah,” I managed, but Nightingale rolled his eyes.

“Peter, Molly, meet Jack,” he said, gesturing between us. The young man on the bed lifted a hand in a casual wave, one eyebrow raised. His eyes were like chips of ice and he didn’t seem to be feeling the cold in the room at all, even if it was cold enough that my breath was visible. Nightingale, much to my disappointment (and possibly Molly’s, but I never know with Molly), was buttoning up his pyjama shirt.

“That’s Jack Frost?” I asked.

“Oh, well done,” the Old God purred, rolling his eyes. “He is a smart one, Thomas.”

“Jack,” Nightingale warned, and the young man stood up from the bed with more grace than I could manage on my best day.

“Sorry,” he said, and managed to sound it, a little. Jack Frost moved his hands a little, like pulling open a drawer, and the chest that I remembered from the attic appeared in front of him, hovering in mid-air.

Molly gave me a very annoyed look.

“Um, I might have gone into the corner,” I admitted, and she upped the look to something that promised cold cups of tea for at least the next week.

“No, no,” Jack grinned. His teeth, while nowhere near as long as Molly’s, were flawlessly white and looked very, very sharp. “You did me a favour – I’d forgotten where I’d left it. Without your little jumpstart...”

He sauntered closer, the chest hanging in mid-air where he’d left it, and right into my personal space. Nightingale, finished with his buttons and having shrugged into his dressing gown, took a half-step forward as Molly tensed beside me.

“Jack,” he said again, and the young man laughed, the sound somehow managing to peal like sleigh bells.

“Oh, Thomas, don’t you worry your pretty little self. I wouldn’t harm a hair on your Starling’s head!” The Old God turned his full attention on me, and I felt a full blast of _vestigia_ hit me – the cracking of snow-weighted branches in woods at winter, the smell of a log fire, and the taste of roast meat hit me so hard I flinched back. Jack Frost stared at me, and I was surprised to notice that he was a good five inches shorter than me. He’d seemed taller.

“It seems I owe you a favour, little Starling,” he said, eyes serious. I glanced over his shoulder at Nightingale, who was wary, but not poised to start throwing fireballs. The cut of the pyjama shirt and dressing gown left a V of skin exposed, and I saw the darkening skin of a bruise just under the line of his jaw.

Jack Frost leaned in, and stood up on tiptoes to put his mouth close to my ear, whispering something for only me to hear.

“That’s a bonus,” he said, louder, as he pulled back. Then he grabbed for the chest, somehow managing to tuck it into his trouser pocket without seemingly shrinking it at all, and stepped away.

“Thomas – as always, a pleasure,” he grinned, sketching a mock-salute, and was gone before Nightingale could finish rolling his eyes.

“Molly, a round of tea, I think,” Nightingale said and she left in a rustle of heavy skirts. “Peter...”

I shook my head. “Not my business what you get up to, sir, in your own bedroom,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as... alright, yes, as jealous as I felt. He shifted in front of me, about as awkward as I’d ever seen him.

“That’s... Jack and I go back a long way.”

“...All the way to the Sixties?” I asked, grinning a little and felt the tension break as Nightingale visibly relaxed.

He huffed a laugh. “He’s possessive,” he said, “but forgetful. He’d forgotten it’s been sixty years since we last saw each other. And the last time we did...”

I bit my lip to avoid laughing – Nightingale resembled nothing short of a bashful schoolboy standing in front of me.

“Well, sixty years is a long time,” he said, casting his gaze about the room, but avoiding my eyes. “And, well, people move on.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, and Nightingale finally met my gaze.

“Oh, do go and get dressed, Peter. I have it on good authority that the temperature should start rising today, and we should be seeing the last of the snow by the end of the week. I believe the Commissioner would appreciate the good news.”

“Sure, boss – but you might want to do something about –” I gestured to my neck, and watched with fascination as Nightingale blushed.

“Right. Oh, Peter,” he called after me as I turned to go. I paused, looking back at him. “That – I mean, if you...”

“We can talk later, sir,” I said, “mustn’t keep the Commissioner waiting.”

Nightingale gave me an almost shy smile, and I left, Jack Frost’s words echoing around my mind.

_“He moaned your name, you know.”_

The sun shone through the open curtains of a window as I passed, already feeling warmer than the day before, and I thought that it was probably going to be a good day. Christmas was coming, the sun was shining again and, while we had to present ourselves to the Commissioner – a job no lowly PC wishes for – there was always the prospect of a chat with Nightingale later.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from 'Fragment' by Stephen Watts


End file.
